As Frank Beamer walks into Lefty’s Main Street Grille, a couple greets him, then another does so as he gets to his table and a third does as he leaves. They all tell him he looks great—losing 32 pounds will do that for a man. “I’ll never be fat again,” he says. He couldn’t have looked any better in that tuxedo for his daughter’s wedding, either.

Beamer is famous in Blacksburg, Va. … but nowhere else. In the era of the larger-than-life Supercoach, he has built a career—he is entering his 26th season at Virginia Tech—on consistency. There is no Beamer statue to worship or to tear down. He doesn’t have Bear Bryant’s houndstooth hat, Bobby Bowden’s “dadgum” or Joe Paterno’s Grand Experiment.

But that’s for the better. Bryant died four weeks after his last win, Bowden was forced to vacate 12 wins before being fired, and Paterno, who died in January, was stripped of 111 wins after an investigation determined he had a role in covering up the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

If there’s a lesson for the college football world, it’s this: Boring is the new sexy. With little fanfare, Beamer has led his team to a bowl game every season since 1993. He has the most wins among active FBS coaches with 251.

Yet perhaps because of his struggles in bowl games—his record is 8-11—and lack of a national championship, he doesn’t get near the recognition of Nick Saban or Urban Meyer or any of a handful of other superstar coaches.

Beamer’s former players want to change that. Jim Pyne, a Virginia Tech offensive lineman in the early ’90s, names other coaches he played for and coached with—Sam Wyche, Tony Dungy, Jon Gruden, Jim Haslett and Andy Reid. “That’s a great group. By far the greatest and best coach and man I’ve ever been around is Coach Beamer. It’s not even close,” he says. “He’s not going to give you the sound bite or sex appeal of some other guys I mentioned. But X’s and O’s, he’s as good as all of them, and the intangibles he’s better, a better person.”

‘WHAT CAN YOU DO TO MAKE IT BETTER?’

Beamer is driving his Cadillac around campus. The windows are down as the air conditioner gets cranked up. Country music plays on the radio. Though it’s a hot summer afternoon, a lot of people are out and about. Defensive coordinator Bud Foster is walking down the street. Beamer honks his horn and waves.

This is home. Beamer played football here and for nearly three decades has been the Hokies’ coach. Both of his children and more than 30 of his relatives studied here. He nods toward the dorm, Miles Hall, where he lived. Behind him is Lane Stadium. Over there is the fraternity house where he took his wife, Cheryl, on their first (blind) date, one of the brightest days of his life.

But there is darkness here, too. He points out Norris Hall, where Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 30 of his 32 victims and then himself, on April 16, 2007. He pulls over, next to the Drillfield, where there is a memorial.

He was in his office when it happened, and he knew the community would look to him for leadership. He tried to be as visible as possible. One memory, from a week after the shooting, sticks with him. While walking on campus, he came upon a woman, her face buried in her hands, crying. He told her what he told everyone he talked to, that Virginia Tech must not let itself be defined by the tragedy.

“What I’m proud of is how we at Virginia Tech reacted to that. That’s how I think we’re going to be remembered. Not that there’s one sick guy who shot 32 people. But how Virginia Tech came together and hung together,” he says. “To this day, I walk around campus a lot. I think people respect each other more, care about each other more. We took a situation and dealt with it as well as we could and became stronger and tighter since then.”

In moments big and small throughout his life, resilience has been one of Beamer’s defining characteristics. It’s a trait he likes about himself and his football teams and admires in other people. It’s a trait he acquired early in life, as he spent three or four miserable summers in the hospital undergoing 32 operations to repair burns across his face, neck, shoulder and arm. Seven years old when that gas can suddenly exploded, he might have died if his brother, Barnett, hadn’t been there to roll him around on the ground to put out the fire.

Fifty-eight years later, the scars remain visible. So does their impact on his life.

“I’d be there in the hospital, thinking about the people out there playing baseball, my buddies playing baseball,” he says. “I’d get to feeling sorry for myself. My mom, she was always kind of take-charge—‘Get up. Let’s go down this hall right here.’ We’d go down the hallway, and it wouldn’t be any time at all before you saw three people, five people, 10 people that had it worse than you. It said, ‘Hey, take what you have, build on it, but it is what it is. Take the situation. What can you do to make it better?’ That’s a philosophy that stayed with me the whole time.”

He would need it. In his first six years at Virginia Tech, Beamer had two winning seasons. In 1992, the Hokies went 2-8-1, a debacle he never would have survived in today’s win-now climate. The athletic director at the time, Dave Braine, stuck by him.

“The first week of the season, I was sitting in church. A guy behind me, and this was about the 15th time he did this, he tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘When are you going to get rid of Beamer?’ ” Braine says.

Instead of firing Beamer, Braine quit going to church for a while.

“I started going to the office on Sundays. I’d bring three dozen doughnuts to the football office, and I’d watch film with the coaches,” he says.

Those Sunday visits reaffirmed Braine’s faith in Beamer. Still, Beamer needed to change things—to make them better. He was a good coach and a nice guy, maybe too nice. He hired defensive coordinator Phil Elmassian, who brought an in-your-face approach that Beamer lacks. Though Elmassian coached at Virginia Tech for just two years, his influence remains.

Beamer’s teams are defined by their hard-hitting, tough defense and game-changing special teams.

“I don’t know that we ever play a better fundamental team,” says Jim Grobe, Wake Forest’s head coach and Beamer’s good friend.

On special teams, in particular, Beamer sees the chance to win games with big plays.

“We want to be the attack guy. We don’t want to sit here and just try to contain you—we want to go after you and see if we can’t force errors in that part of the game,” he says.

The defense and special teams have led Beamer’s teams to win at least 10 games in each of the last eight seasons, including four ACC championships. A ninth year looks likely. Quarterback Logan Thomas has the chance to be great. Beamer says the key will be getting his inexperienced players, particularly on the offensive line, to play at a level of consistency that matches their talent.

INTENSELY COMPETITIVE

If Virginia Tech football is known for anything outside of defense and special teams, it’s the team’s entrance to the Metallica song “Enter Sandman.” Beamer loves it … though that’s as deep as he has gone into Metallica’s catalog. He laughs when he is asked which Metallica song is his second favorite (answer: He doesn’t have one).

As he names all of the country music artists he likes (all of them, apparently), an aide pops into his office. He says a recruit from Florida is on the phone and wants to commit.

Beamer excuses himself to take the call. When he returns, he is as excited as he would be if he had left to talk to his wife about picking up a gallon of milk on his way home. He has been coaching too long to get giddy over one commitment, but a steady approach to recruiting is another of his hallmarks. He loves winning and hates losing but wants Monday to be the same regardless.

“That’s how I want my team to play,” he says. “Emotionally, you’ve got to be up there. But you have to keep your head, and you’ve got to make good decisions and play hard.”

Beamer’s critics (of which there aren’t many) mistake his level-headedness for the lack of a killer instinct, as if a man could win 251 college football games without it. He’s intensely competitive. His son, Shane Beamer, tells a golf story to make the point. A few summers ago, Shane, an assistant coach at Tech, showed up at the family’s lake house and beat his dad the first time they played.

“I made the mistake of coming home and gloating a little bit around my mom and my wife and people who were in the house,” Shane Beamer says. “He just sat there and listened, never said a word. Then for the next two weeks, he proceeded to beat the heck out of me. Never said a word about it but made his point very clear. That’s him in a nutshell.” As much as Beamer wants to stay in the comfortable middle, he’s also always preparing to lose it because it does get lost at some point. His teams are 1-19 against top five opponents. The sun has not shone every day in Blacksburg. Still, it rises, and Beamer doesn’t lose sight of that.

“You work every day for the crisis because there’s going to be a crisis sometime during the year. You lose a game or somebody gets in trouble with the police,” Beamer says. Having solid relationships, he says, means when problems arise, solving them is easier. “Then, when you lose that ballgame, you have a chance to get with the players, find out what the problem is and solve it, rather than pointing fingers and falling apart.”